The way I see it, one really has a number of choices in cases where
pronouns must be used (more correctly, I should say "cases where the
speaker wants to use a pronoun", never mind must; it's the
speaker's language, after all), and the gender is either

Generic: When somebody comes to see you, you should offer ___ coffee.or

Unknown: ___ signed it 'Chris'.
You can use he/she, he or she, s/he, or some other
kludgy phrase. This offends just about everybody, including most likely
the speaker ___self, because it is a kludge. It's polysyllabic
and syntactically complex, and it draws attention to its political
correctness at the expense of its sense and reference. It's
distracting, and it's a poor informational strategy because of that,
just as misspelling is a poor informational strategy in writing. What
one normally wants in a pronoun is something monosyllabic and unstressed
that won't draw any attention. After all, we already know who we're
talking about, or we wouldn't be using a pronoun in the first
place. This is a lose-lose situation.

Then there are two conventional solutions that violate one Rule of
Grammar each, and therefore incense some people. Which people they
incense depends on which Rule of Grammar is being violated -- there are
several different Special Interest Groups involved.

You can use he generically, which violates the Rule of
Grammar that saysthathe is Masculine, and therefore
can't be used with Feminine reference, even Indefinite Feminine
reference, just as you can't use it.
(This violates a Gender Agreement rule)

Once the patient is prepped, he should
be moved into the delivery room.

You can use they generically, which violates the Rule
of Grammar that saysthat they is Plural, and
therefore can't be used with Singular reference, even Indefinite
Singular reference, just as you can't use we.
(This violates a Number Agreement rule)

Once the patient is prepped, they should
be moved into the delivery room.

Neither rule seems to me worth dying for, since they're just
generalizations about number and gender agreement, and Number and
Gender are just abstract grammatical properties. On its surface,
it should be about as important to public policy as, say, Goldbach's
Conjecture. Obviously, everybody does as they please, for whatever
reason pleases them. There are no doubt statistical
generalizations one could draw, but they wouldn't really settle the
etiquetical problem of what's polite to use. And that depends on whom
you're willing to offend, apparently.

Some people
do get very exercised about grammar, nonetheless.Different
people with each rule, in fact.

The people who get upset about violating Rule 1, the gender agreement
rule, tend to be women, and men who don't feel like excluding
women.

The people who get upset about violating Rule 2, the
number agreement rule, on the other hand, tend to be people who
don't know much about language, of both genders.

If offense be inevitable, I would personally prefer not to offend people
because of their sex, which they really aren't responsible for; but I
don't mind nearly so much offending people because of their ignorance.

-- followup

[from the same post, part of the ongoing generic "he/she" dispute.]
> A language is defined by its grammar and its vocabulary,
> and these are defined by the people who speak it, not by those who
> think they know better. There is not yet, thank God, an Acamedie Anglaise.

No, and there never will be, at least not one with that name.
And I think not ever, given anything approaching the current
global linguistic reality. If there were such a thing, and
it weren't just a figment of national bravado, it would have
to take account of the fact that there are far more
non-native than native English speakers in the world,
with the result that it would probably be located in Singapore,
as the centroid of the English-speaking world.

> "emself" is in the same realms of rubbish speak as "personhole-cover"
> and Esperanto.

I'm not sure what you mean by realm of rubbish speak;
rubbish isn't used on this side of the pond quite so often, and
even has a faintly Colonel Blimp air. But it's clear that
'emself, personhole-cover, and Esperanto belong in three
separate categories, or realms.
Some of which you may not approve of, I take it.

Esperanto is a social movement with a linguistic agenda.

Personhole-cover is a satiric exaggeration, in origin the same as
politically correct itself. Nobody ever says
personhole-cover, unless they're intending to sneer at it.
There's lots of those; satirists have always loved fatuous
officialspeak. Another member of the genre is spokesperchild,
which first changes spokesman to spokesperson because
man is supposedly masculine. Then, in a fit of hypercorrectness,
it washes that man right out of its hair by changing the
masculine son to child.

Nobody's ever said spokesperchild, either, but it's a logical
conclusion to the idea that people blindly follow grammatical rules.
And the wrong rules at that; the -son in person isn't
masculine at all. It comes from Latin persona, which isn't even
remotely related to the English word son.

As to 'emself, of course that's written, and it's silly, or eye
dialect, when written. Spoken, however, /EmsElf/, or more likely
/@msElf/ with stressed ultima is very close to how a majority of
American English native speakers actually pronounce both himself
and themselves, not to mention the occasional generic or
indeterminate themself. The final consonant is recognizably
labiodental, thus representing either an /f/ or a /v/, and the /-z/
plural marker that ostensibly follows /v/ in the official plural is
actually rather rare in normal speech, simply because /-vz/ is not a
particularly easy cluster to articulate, and things like that go first
in fast speech.

(listen carefully to the way English speakers say the fraction
five-sixths; you'll find the /0/ (theta) between the two
/s/'s disappears almost totally, because /sIks0s/ is practically
impossible to articulate at speed.)

As a benefit, swallowing the /z/ allows one to be indeterminate
about matters of both gender and number, a considerable utility.
That's not trash. That's efficiency. It's also accurate, in
that it represents what people actually say, i.e, the real language.

Whatever English orthographs wind up deciding about the written
version of the pronoun will be just about as irrelevant in the
future as they have been in the past. A very interesting history
of English language reform movements can be found in Dennis
Baron's Grammar or Good Taste?.

-- more followup:

(double >'s refer to the posting above:
>> As to "emself", of course that's written, and is silly, or eye
>> dialect, when written. Spoken, however, /EmsElf/, or more likely
>> /@msElf/ with stressed ultima is very close to how a majority
>> of American English native speakers actually pronounce both
>> "himself" and "themselves", not to mention the occasional
>> generic or indeterminate "themself". The final consonant is
>> recognizably labiodental, thus representing either an /f/ or
>> a /v/, and the /-z/ plural marker that ostensibly follows /v/
>> in the official plural is actually rather rare in normal speech,
>> simply because /-vz/ is not a particularly easy cluster to
>> articulate, and things like that go first in fast speech.
> But it's a lot easier than /fz/ which is why the /s/ becomes a /z/
> after /d/, /g/, /v/, /dh/ and /b/ as opposed to remaining an /s/
> after /t/, /k/, /f/, /th/ and /p/.

That's what happens, but that's not exactly why. The phenomenon
is called voicing assimilation, and it's extremely common for
consonant clusters (in many languages) to share voicing properties
(i.e, be all voiced like /vz/ or be all voiceless like /fs/).

And it's a property of the plural (here), possessive, and 3sg present
active indicative inflections (all of which are identical, except for
their exceptions, like

The men are here (plural)

The man's hat
(possessive)

He mans the gun (3sg pres act ind),

rather than a property of English generally.
We do a fair amount of voicing assimilation, but not as much as (say)
Russian, where it is a general property.

That is, the voicing assimilation that makes these morphemes voiceless
/s/ after voiceless consonants, and voiced /z/ after voiced consonants
and vowels (including the epenthetic
shwa that follows sibilants /kIs/
- /kIs@z/) is not so much a matter of "ease" as it is of
rule. Phonology is indissolubly bound to phonetics, but it has
lots of arbitrary dimensions as well, since it deals with the details of
the sound systems of very different languages. So ease of
pronunciation is important, but that's equally true for
everybody; if it were the only, or even the dominant variable, everybody
would talk the same.

> In fact, /vz/ is also a lot easier than /fs/ which is probably why
> -self becomes -selves in the plural.

Alas, not so. Different rule. And there's no evidence that /vz/
is a lot easier than /fs/. If anything, the reverse is true,
since:

/vz/ is voiced, and thus requires participation of the larynx,
which would otherwise be uninvolved -- i.e, there's more physical
effort and control required, and

at the end of the word, the environment is more likely to
condition voicelessness than voicing: a voiceless segment is
closer to [silence] (i.e, the end of the word) than a voiced
one, and this can be seen as a variety of voicing assimilation.
This is a theoretical prediction from the theory, but it's
supported by the fact that, in the languages of the world,
terminal devoicing rules like German's are a dime a dozen, but
terminal voicing is comparatively rare.

>> (listen carefully to the way English speakers say the fraction
>> "five-sixths"; you'll find the /0/ (theta) between the two
>> /s/'s disappears almost totally, because /sIks0s/ is practically
>> impossible to articulate at speed.)
> So slow down :-) I've never noticed myself omitting the 'th'.

That's why Usenet is the wrong venue to discuss phonetics. The data is
(or are) the important thing(s). When you learn phonetics you will see
what I mean. In the meantime, while you may be correct -- I
can't tell -- I urge you to pay closer attention. If you don't omit
theta in unmonitored natural speech (anybody can say it slowly with
care, but that doesn't count), you're speaking a very unusual brand of
English.

---- still more followup:

>> That is, the voicing assimilation that makes these morphemes voiceless
>> /s/ after voiceless consonants, and voiced /z/ after voiced consonants
>> and vowels (including the epenthetic shwa that follows sibilants
>> /kIs/ - /kIs@z/) is not so much a matter of "ease" as it is of rule.
> Speaking as a non-linguist but as someone who finds language fascinating,
> I find it hard to believe that any of the English we speak exists because
> of rule - I would have thought that it is _all_ a matter of ease and
> usage.

So, if you're right, we still have to describe how it's
easier, right? And that means starting with the actual
descriptions of the sounds, the muscles, the nerves, the air flow, etc,
right? That's what phonetics does. And it shows that ease is as
much a matter of habit as anything. What we're used to doing is easy,
what we're not is hard.

It's not that you're wrong -- of course ease has something to do
with it -- it's just that saying it's all a matter of ease and usage is
like saying that evolution is just a matter of living and dying. Not
exactly a useful scientific theory, though undoubtedly true. For one
thing, it leaves ease and usage comfortably ill-defined,
so they can be used to explain anything. And are correspondingly
useless for prediction, which is what we really want to be able to do.

So we have to be much more careful about descriptions and
explanations; otherwise we're apt to attribute everything
to something that's what Bateson calls a Dormitive Principle,
like instinct

> The linguists came along later, to my mind, and tried to decide -
> and are still trying to decide, in some cases - what rules are followed.

Sure, we're still trying to figure it out. Let me know when true
artificial intelligence is achieved, and then we'll have a go at
modelling real language. We've only been at it for about a hundred
years, you know, and only looking at syntax for about 50.

> [When they _do_ try to give us rules, they often manage to screw it up
> completely, by trying to tell us not to end sentences with prepositions
> or to split infinitives etc. Some of the earlier ones even managed to
> get us, on both sides of the Atlantic, to spell "ache" with a 'ch'
> rather than a 'k'. :)]

Wait a minute. Those folks you're kvetching about are not
linguists. Those people are the people who don't
pay attention to actual language, who don't really understand the
grammar, and who can't give a convincing reason for their choice
beyond the indisputable fact that it's theirs and they like it.

Sorry, I'm not taking the heat for that bunch. When a
linguist talks about a rule, they're not referring to a law that
has to be enforced, like Thou Shalt Not Spit on the Sidewalk, or Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives. They're referring to a law that describes
actual behavior, like the Law of Gravity, or Gresham's Law, or Grimm's
Law. Telling people how they do talk is one thing; telling them
how they should talk is quite another. The oral realm is quite
sufficient for me without trying to take over the moral realm.

>>> In fact, /vz/ is also a lot easier than /fs/ which is probably why
>>> -self becomes -selves in the plural.
>> Alas, not so. Different rule. And there's no evidence that /vz/
>> is "a lot easier" than /fs/. If anything, the reverse is true,
>> since (a) /vz/ is voiced, and thus requires participation of the
>> larynx, which would otherwise be uninvolved -- i.e, there's more
>> physical effort and control required, and (b) at the end of the
>> word, the environment is more likely to condition voicelessness
>> than voicing.
> Now I think of it, it could have something to do with the 'l'. I notice
> that, for example, my Dutch colleagues cannot pronounce "self" as one
> syllable - it becomes "seluf" like "film" becomes "filum" - whereas
> they can pronounce "themselves". Just a guess.